Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft

Named to the Civil Eats "2025 Food and Farming Holiday Book Gift Guide" 

How we can meet the challenges of our age by moving away from the political and economic philosophies of both the left and right to a more equitable re-organization of society, economy, land and food production, driven by the local community rather than a central government.

Today, society and government are still asking what our country can yield, and in what quantity. They do so because in a sense we are still living in conquest-based societies. Agrarian thinker Chris Smaje opens this book by drawing an arresting modern parallel to Viking raiding, trading and enslaving societies and the Ragnarok they faced then of dramatic climate change and societal collapse.

So, to meet these modern crises, Chris asks us to look beyond the current discourse of capitalism versus chaos, and indeed the dualism of 'state versus market' and the 'state with the market', both of which has failed us.

Instead, Chris explores a world where we live slower lives more immersed in local ecologies. Where our present Viking age has inflicted a thorough alienation from place and local livelihood, Chris proposes other models of collective organization, where land and capital are seen as a common good that involves a widespread and secure redistribution. These ideas are the basic principles associated with distributism - broadly, that issues should be dealt with at the most immediate or local level feasible and governance, wherever possible, should be bottom-up. There should also be a moral economy founded in ideals of justice.

Work and production should rest on commitments struck in a community rather than deals in a market. There should be a concept of shared common good, of what life is for. Ultimately, we should build a sense of future possibility around local ecological societies dedicated to human and ecological wellbeing.

Much of the global damage to the environment has arisen not because people were there in the landscape, but because they weren't. It's time to hospice modernity and build a green Earth rising. In this book, Chris discusses what this society and landscape might look like in the near future and longer term.

Chris Smaje has coworked a small farm in Somerset, southwest England, for the last twenty years. Previously, he was a university-based social scientist, working in the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey and the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths College in the UK. Since switching focus to the practice and politics of agroecology, he's written for publications such as The Land, Dark Mountain, Permaculture magazine and Statistics Views as well as academic journals such as Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems and the Journal of Consumer Culture. Chris is the author of A Small Farm Future and Saying No to a Farm-free Future, writes a blog at https: //chrissmaje.com and is a featured author at resilience.org.

Review Quotes:

'With patience, thoroughness and good humour, Chris Smaje is charting a vitally needed path beyond the dead end of industrial modernity, into the kind of world in which we're likely to find ourselves. I can't think of a better companion for that journey, and I look forward to seeing this book illuminate our conversations along the way.'--Dougald Hine, author of At Work in the Ruins

'This is how we make it through. Amid all the greenwash and business as usual, facing denial, deflection and despair, Chris Smaje brings his trademark integrity, generosity of spirit and clarity of thought to the world as it is - and as it could be. It feels grittily real, this mosaic of ideas. Of communities of place, purpose and passion welding themselves together with a plan B when the lights have gone out and we're past the point of fighting over toilet roll because the supermarkets are empty and dark and - horror! - the internet has gone down. Who are we then? What values do we share that really matter to us? How can we build something from the emergent rubble that makes our hearts sing? This is a blueprint, and Every Single Individual who can read should have a copy and refer to it. Our world would be quite different if we did.'--Manda Scott, author of Any Human Power; host, Accidental Gods podcast

'As Gaia lays waste to the hubris of capitalist modernity, it's becoming clear that we humans need to unlearn many lifeways and invent new ones. A big thanks to Chris Smaje, then, for expanding our imaginations and giving us courage. He explains how, in the coming epoch of the Ecocene, we can create institutions and cultures that honour care, social reciprocity, bottom-up empowerment and respect for Earth as alive. All will be essential.'--David Bollier, activist-scholar of the commons; author of Think Like a Commoner

'With a blend of deep academic wisdom and of-the-land pragmatism, Chris Smaje looks to a fascinating medieval history to show us how humankind can not only persist but thrive -reclaiming autonomy, community, even joy - in the face of civilizational collapse. Finding Lights in a Dark Age is indeed the antidote to our fear about the current looming global catastrophe. But it is also the push so many of us (myself included!) need to start working in our own small ways, now, for what might be needed in the precarious years ahead.'--Jennifer Grayson, author of Unlatched and A Call to Farms

'At once pragmatic and visionary, Finding Lights in a Dark Age is a meditation on how we might make the best of the difficult times ahead. Smaje brings every bit of himself to this book, daring us to upend conventional wisdom about progress in service of a richer and more natural kind of human thriving. Count me in.'--Philip Loring, author of Finding Our Niche

'Farmer and social scientist Chris Smaje offers a credible, and delightful, glimpse of a small-scale agrarian future. He combines personal experience, cross-disciplinary scholarship and pragmatic analysis with that rarest of grails in future-focused writing: plausible optimism.'--Samuel Miller McDonald, author of Progress

'Incisive and irenic, this is Chris Smaje at his wide-ranging best, exploring the territories of liveable-but-realistic human futures. Chris sweeps away the cobwebs of late-modern thinking to sketch what a sober pathway through the coming morass might look like. A guiding light!'--Carwyn Graves, author of Tir: The Story of the Welsh Landscape